Left to right: Photograph by Samir Hussein/Wireimage. From Coleman-Rayner.

NO ROSE WITHOUT A THORN
Right to left: Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, at Royal Ascot last June. Thomas Markle Sr. and his now estranged daughter, Meghan, in the early 90s.

Meghan Markle, a.k.a. the Duchess of Sussex, has become the darling of the British press and a royal Cinderella story. But her American family presents a more complicated story. Vanessa Grigoriadis digs deep to uncover the untold truths that turned one of the year’s biggest stories into a fractured, Kardashianified royal fairy tale.

Meghan Markle will never, in all likelihood, be Queen. But among the
many benefits of marrying Prince Harry and becoming Duchess of Sussex is
that she and Harry will have their own domain, a special relationship
with the 53 Commonwealth countries, in many of which Meghan’s mixed-race
American background will be an asset. On her intricately planned 16-day
tour of a few of these formerly colonized territories in the South
Pacific, her first trip as an H.R.H., she ruled with her characteristic,
almost magical mix of micro-management and moments of authenticity,
exhibiting the type of spontaneous human interaction with which the
royals have long struggled. In Sydney, she fell to her knees to greet a
wheelchair-bound 98-year-old war widow, and in New Zealand, she directed
underlings to distribute petits fours to a passel of children in a town
square. In Dubbo, New South Wales, she labored over a baked banana
bread, then presented it to a family of fifth-generation farmers. “She
said if you go to someone’s house, you always bring something, so she
did,” said the farmer’s daughter, overwhelmed by the honor of eating
princess bread. “She said she was worried about the bananas, that she’d
put too many bananas in it,” except “the Duke said there’s never too
many bananas.”

But when Meghan arrived at the University of the South Pacific, in Suva,
Fiji, this perfection was pierced. She was on hand to deliver a speech
about the importance of funding girls’ education, her clavicle swathed
in a ceremonial necklace resembling a dozen calves’ feet sprouting
orange and pink peonies, and she proceeded with humanizing detail and
flawless diction: “As a university graduate, I know the personal
feeling of pride and excitement that comes with attending university,”
she explained, her raven tresses gently pulled back from her face. “It
was through scholarships, financial-aid programs, and work-study where
my earnings from a job on campus went directly towards my tuition that I
was able to attend university,” she continued. “And, without question,
it was worth every effort.”

Within a day, a dissenting voice piped up from a world away, part of
what has become Meghan’s own personal chorus: her American family. Her
half-sister, Samantha Markle, a 53-year-old blonde with M.S. who is
confined to a wheelchair, began tapping out tweets, soon to be converted
into headlines. Insisting “Dad paid for her college education,”
Samantha added, “I love my sister but this is ridiculous.” She also
called Meghan “delusionally absurd.”

And this week, the most important voice in the chorus, Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, went on Piers Morgan’s British morning TV show to complain about his daughter’s “ghosting” of him, and to ask the queen herself to intervene in the family squabble.

Even if she’s not the monarchy’s most important princess—this honor
goes to the assiduously pleasant Kate Middleton, one day to be queen
consort—Meghan is the princess of the moment, as transformational in
her way as Princess Di. She is the only female self-made millionaire in
the royal family, her fortune coming from her work on Suits and on film;
one of the oldest pregnant royals in a century (she’s 37); and the first
bi-racial person in a family of people who used to powder their faces to
make themselves whiter. As a royal, she’s not allowed to make political
statements, but she’s an acknowledged feminist who advocates for gay
rights, and for her first charitable endeavor, she collaborated with the
mostly Muslim survivors of the Grenfell fire.

GENERATIONS EX
Thomas senior with Meghan and grandsons Tyler and Thomas III during happier days in the mid-90s.

From Coleman-Rayner.

This soon-to-be mom to the first (known) bi-racial baby in the history
of the monarchy represents the new and modern, all that America has
given and will, if our politicians let us, continue to give to the
world. She’s like the one percent Gal Gadot. Even her gaffes are merely
evidence that she’s shaking up the royal family, which is dedicated to
conservatism and self-perpetuation. When she refuses to wear
nude-colored stockings to official events, as royals tend to, and goes
bare-legged in the summer humidity, we cheer. When she closes her own
car door, instead of waiting for a valet, it’s fraught with
down-to-earth, woman-of-the-people symbolism. Her public performance has
been near-flawless. She came from nowhere, and re-invented the way the
British royal family could behave.

But of course Meghan didn’t come from nowhere, exactly. She came from
the American hinterland, from an aspirational, peripatetic, and, yes,
dysfunctional family, with whom she shares many traits, even if she
sometimes seems to want to deny them. Where the British have generations
of Plantagenets and Tudors, Americans have Jay Gatsby, a man who loved
clothes as much as any princess (“I’ve never seen such—such beautiful
shirts before”) and a past he liked to keep hidden. Meghan isn’t
Gatsby, exactly—she hasn’t expunged her background. But there’s
something of Fitzgerald’s antihero in Meghan’s preternatural American
re-invention. She comes from a family of acolytes of motivational
speakers and reality shows (Tony Robbins and the Kardashians are
touchstones), people who believe that the future doesn’t at all have to
be governed by the past. According to a Hollywood source, when her star
was rising she threw herself a party at her home unofficially billed as
a “Sayonara Zara” party and gave away the lower- priced clothes in her
closet to her guests.

The blowup between Meghan and some of her biological family has been a
rare fiasco for the Duchess, aided and abetted by elements that include
the British tabloids’ dexterity at fomenting race- and class-based
discord, the royal family’s usual resistance to change, and the
unbridled loopiness and more than occasional meanness of some Markles
(her half-sister has called Meghan “the Duchess of Nonsense”). It has
also pointed up an essential difference between our two countries: Brits
often can’t escape their families, or even their class, whereas our myth
is based on striking out on one’s own.

Beneath the performance, Meghan, reporting indicates, is a solitary,
emotionally guarded perfectionist likely carrying scar tissue from her
tumultuous background. The story of her biological family is a sprawling
American epic, both up-by-the-bootstraps and
shirtsleeves-to-shirtsleeves, generations’ worth of new beginnings, of
which Meghan’s is the most spectacular. There are appearances by slaves
and slave owners, cross-country journeys in pursuit of the American
Dream, and the eventual attainment of a middle-class Angeleno life that
played out for most of her family like a stoner shaggy-dog tale.

Royal historians have dug deeply through the ancestry of Meghan’s
mother, Doria Ragland, as with anyone newly incorporated into royal
lineage, and located her first known ancestor: a slave born in 1830 in
Jonesboro, Georgia, the setting for Gone with the Wind, named Richard
Ragland (the surname most likely came from the man who enslaved him). A
generation later, during Reconstruction, many Raglands lit out for
Southern California; in the 1950s, Doria’s parents moved from Ohio to
Los Angeles, too. Her father ran an antique store, ‘Twas New.

Doria, gentle and loving, met Meghan’s father, Tom, in L.A., though he
had been raised on the East Coast. He was the youngest of three sons in
a creative family in the small town of Newport, Pennsylvania. One of his
older brothers joined the air force and became an international
diplomat. The other is the bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Catholic
Church in America, which is a church that I, as a practicing member of
the Eastern Orthodox religion, was surprised never to have heard of
before. At one point the church had a few hundred parishioners, though
the Association of Religion Data Archives’ listing for the number of
today’s flock is blank.

Tom, taciturn but lighthearted, enjoyed making practical jokes and
putting on plays. After high school, he moved to the Poconos to work in
theater, then to Chicago, eventually becoming a lighting designer. He
married for the first time at 19, having two kids—Samantha and her
brother, Thomas junior—before divorcing in the early 1970s and setting
out for the West Coast, sans famille, to try his luck in Hollywood’s big
leagues. When he met Doria, he was working as the lighting director of
ABC’s long-running daytime soap General Hospital, on which nurses and
doctors have lusty affairs while also performing heroic heart
transplants. Doria, 12 years his junior, was a trainee makeup artist for
the soap. The groovy couple was married at Sunset Boulevard’s
Self-Realization Fellowship, shrine of the Hindu guru Yogananda, located
down the street from the compound of the Church of Scientology.

DON’T WORRY, BABY
Left: Meghan, at one, with half-sister Samantha at their family home in Los Angeles, 1982. Right: Meghan and Thomas senior in Big Bear, California, circa 1993.

Left, From Splash News; Right, From Coleman-Rayner.

Doria and Tom moved in together a couple of years before Meghan was
born, along with Samantha and Thomas junior, who had relocated to L.A.
after living with their mom. The teenage siblings were unruly. Samantha
was auditioning for film and TV parts, or working the Lancôme counter at
the Beverly Center and as an extra on A Different World, Lisa Bonet’s
spin-off of The Cosby Show. According to a biography by Andrew Morton,
Meghan: A Hollywood Princess, Thomas junior spent time smoking weed with
his friends at the family home in Woodland Hills, a burb in the Valley.
Ragland, who eventually opened a small boutique selling sundresses in a
Topanga mall, wasn’t averse to joints, either, according to Samantha.
They were a family of the type of low-level creatives who abound in
Hollywood, enjoying an offbeat life in the sunshine. When Meghan would
pitch a tantrum in her high chair, scattering peas on the floor, her dad
would encourage her and even get in on the action himself, throwing more
peas. Once, when Thomas junior and his friends were smoking weed in the
living room while she cried in her room, Tom senior left to tend to her,
then reappeared with a full diaper. He pulled out a spoon and began
eating the contents, later revealing that he’d filled the diaper with
chocolate pudding.

The startling and sensational descended in Meghan’s life with some
regularity, though even as a little girl she was centered and ambitious.
Tom and Doria divorced when Meghan was two. (Samantha and Thomas junior
were on their way out of the house.) Meghan lived with one parent, then
the other, until her adolescence, when she lived with Tom full-time. In
what must have been a dissonant experience for Meghan, after her day at
an all-girls Catholic school, he would pick her up and bring her along
to work with him on the set of Married . . . with Children. Meghan
loved girlie things, and had well-honed methods of dealing with the
chaos and uncertainty of her dysfunctional family. She kept her closet
neat, and even as an adolescent stored her Betsey Johnson shoes in their
original boxes, wrapped in tissue paper, until she was ready to wear
them next. “I remember busying myself and being the president of every
club,” she has said of her schooling. “Not because I actually wanted
to, but because I didn’t want to eat alone at lunchtime. This
overachiever mask I wore was really just the way I battled feeling
displaced.”

It was far from a perfect childhood, but magic always hovered nearby. In
Los Angeles, the American Dream isn’t only made by grit, but rather by
moments of luck. If there is an altar to which Hollywood bows, it’s the
one of serendipity. And in 1990, Tom, who already made a TV salary,
reportedly bought a winning lottery ticket, a stroke of luck not
dissimilar to the one required to transform a California girl into a
British princess. Meghan attended private school and Northwestern,
majoring in international affairs and theater. She was the first person
in her family to go to college.

It’s certainly a partial explanation for the current conflict that,
while Meghan’s good fortunes only multiplied from her father’s doting,
poor investments and family feuds led to a diminishment of Tom’s bank
accounts. Samantha maintains that Tom paid Meghan’s tab when she
enrolled at Northwestern and that if Meghan worked at all, as Samantha
has tweeted, “it was only for extra shoe money and party money.” In
2016, Tom filed for bankruptcy. And Meghan did omit mention in Fiji of
Tom’s contribution to her college education—she attended college
supported by her parents and also financial aid. Though hardly
“delusionally absurd” not to mention them in her Fiji speech, she
could have made the choice to include them.

Meghan followed her father back to Hollywood after a short stint working
at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires (her diplomat uncle has claimed he
set her up), making her way from roles as suitcase girl on Deal or No
Deal to guest spots on CSI to a female lead in Suits. Her starter
marriage to a fast-talking movie producer broke up soon after it began,
partially because the two had to spend months apart when Suits began
filming in Toronto. Meghan dated a popular Canadian chef and started the
Tig, her lifestyle blog; it was one part Goop and another Martha
Stewart, with a consistently eloquent tone and a dollop of social
justice before the topic became trendy. The image Meghan created for
herself was free-spirited and earthy—but not entirely consistent with
who she really was, according to those who know her. “Meghan’s goal was
always becoming a household name,” says an acquaintance in the
television world. “She’s insanely smart and poised, but very, very
guarded. She’s not a person you can actually be friends with. She’s the
type of person who is best friends with her stylist.”

In Toronto, Meghan became a regular at Soho House, an exclusive club
drawing the city’s film, social, and banking set. She began hanging out
with an international crowd, including a power stylist—Jessica
Mulroney, best known for styling Justin Trudeau’s fabulous wife, Sophie
Grégoire Trudeau—and Bahrain-born Misha Nonoo, at that time married to
Alexander Gilkes, the British founder of online auction house Paddle8
and a close friend of Harry’s. “Meghan was socializing with foreign
heiresses—upper-crust, smart, ambitious,” says a friend of Nonoo’s.
“They have everything and they want everything.” Meghan also alighted
on her fairy godmother: Violet von Westenholz, a British Ralph Lauren
public-relations director whose father, an Olympic skier, is besties
with Prince Charles. Von Westenholz knew Harry was looking to become
serious with the right woman, and passed him Meghan’s contact
information.

The trajectory of her family was moving in other directions. They
stopped having holidays together and some eventually stopped speaking to
each other. Money problems were a near-constant. Samantha filed for
bankruptcy in 2003, joined by Thomas junior in 2012. He claimed at the
time that he had $10 in cash and $88,000 in debts. After running into
problems with a boutique she’d opened in Los Angeles, Doria also filed
for bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, the royal family’s personal wealth, which encompasses castles
and endless swaths of British countryside and crown jewels, including a
530-carat cut diamond, the world’s largest, to squabble over, has been
estimated at $85 billion. So it’s no surprise that, to some of her
family, Meghan’s ascension was viewed as an opportunity to play the
Kardashian game while acquiring their own measure of royal wealth and
fame.

This fall, I sent Samantha a number of messages on Facebook, but she was
slow to respond. Reading the tabloids, I realized that she was in
Britain doling out interviews to TV talk shows. Her boyfriend—they
live together in Bellevue, Florida—also accompanied her to Buckingham
Palace and Kensington Palace, where she delivered a handwritten letter
for her sister to a bobby in his flat cap. The guard did not open the
palace gates. The next set of paparazzi photos depicted Samantha
proceeding in her motorized wheelchair to a nearby store, where she
checked out a life-size paper mask of Harry’s face with the eyes cut
out, stocked as a souvenir. Samantha put the mask to her face and smiled
for the camera.

Royalty, to Samantha, may merely be another type of lottery—a
hereditary one. It doesn’t seem that she thinks royalty is worthy of a
great deal of respect, and certainly doesn’t receive its right to rule
from God. Most Brits don’t believe in divine right anymore, either, but
many agree that the royals provide a useful societal function. One I
spoke with discussed the royals’ dependability in attracting tourists,
and quoted the great 19th-century British political writer Walter
Bagehot, who defended the monarchy on non-religious grounds. “A royal
family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty
events,” he explained. “It introduces irrelevant facts into the
business of government, but they are facts which speak to ‘men’s bosoms’
and employ their thoughts.” Bagehot further believed that to cement the
success of the nation the royals had to remain high status. “Our
royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it, you
cannot reverence it,” he wrote. “Its mystery is its life. We must not
let in daylight upon magic.”

It’s part of Meghan’s patent gift for her current role that she appears
to let in daylight—hugging babies and grannies, baking a banana bread
for a family of farmers—making it part of her magic, while maintaining
her royal reserve. But her family, not so respectfully, calls bullshit.

If the royal family is merely a group of well-dressed celebrities, then
Samantha not only doesn’t need to take them seriously, but she has as
much right to be a celebrity as they do. Perhaps this point of view,
combined with the fact that Samantha’s daughter has claimed Meghan put
Samantha in paroxysms of jealousy for many years prior to her engagement
to Harry, meant that she didn’t shy away from tabloids’ phone calls when
they began to poke around Meghan’s family history. Talking to the
British tabloid The Sun, she cast Meghan as a social climber: she said
Meghan was shallow and superficial, had always wanted to become a
princess, and had “a soft spot for gingers.”

When I got in touch with her, Samantha insisted that she was misquoted,
and that the first comment she made about her sister was, “She’s got
the eloquence of Condoleezza Rice and the grace of Princess Diana,” but
this time line does not hold up. Samantha has also announced that she is
writing a book entitled The Diary of Princess Pushy’s Sister, a strange
choice of nomenclature given that “Princess Pushy” is the nickname for
Princess Michael of Kent, who, at the luncheon at which Meghan was
formally introduced to the royal family, appeared wearing a blackamoor
brooch (a type of 17th- and 18th-century jewelry depicting black people
wearing turbans or in subservient poses). Samantha later said she was
misquoted on her title, and in any case the book’s real title was the
still somewhat inappropriate In the Shadows of the Duchess.

Samantha struck me as less a wicked stepsister than a special kind of
trickster, a proficient storyteller with deep emotional intelligence who
was adept at reading my cues. “This story is about a very normal family
thrust into the spotlight,” she said to me a couple of times, seeking
to portray herself as a misunderstood mom of three who was provoked by
her sister. She spoke delightfully about the moment Meg was born: “She
was beautiful and pink, with little teeny fingers that would wrap around
my finger,” she said. “For us, it was very humbling because we were
teenagers freaking out learning how to be young adults in the world, and
adults were doing their career thing outward, but when a baby comes,
there’s an inward focus and fascination. I think it really did pull us
all together.”

Clockwise: Thomas Markle Jr. spotted in Grants Pass, Oregon, October 2017. Tom senior follows news about Meghan in a “paparazzi” moment he
and Samantha staged in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, last April. The front page of The Sun, July 15, 2018. Samantha (center) left a note for estranged sister Meghan with
a Buckingham Palace bobby last October.

From Coleman-Rayner; Bottom Row, From Splash News, From John Frost Newspapers.

If the sisters lost touch down the line, couldn’t that happen in any
family? Samantha says that she planned to support Meghan (“Is London
wheelchair friendly? excited!” she tweeted before the wedding), but
became angry not only when Meghan didn’t invite her to the wedding, but
also because Prince Harry commented to the press that Meghan was
enjoying spending time with the royal family because the royal family
was “the family she never had.” Says Samantha, “Consistently, my
family was being isolated and ignored, like we’re nonexistent.” She
adds, “Like the uncle who got her the internship in Buenos Aires. He’s
not trailer trash. It got back to me that Meg had said about her uncle,
‘I don’t know him,’ and I’m like, ‘What is this, Joan Crawford
speaking?’ ”

The more Samantha talked, the louder the cheering from tabloid reporters
on both sides of the pond. The British reporters were excited for
Samantha to play the role of the uncivilized, low-class American who was
not at all P.L.U., people like us; the American reporters knew their
readership would appreciate her most if she was simply wackadoodle,
another outrageous semi-celebrity for our outraged era. Samantha learned
that a story could be worth $1,500, perhaps $3,000, or even more.
Reporters began lobbing devilish questions her way, such as “Do you
feel your sister is a humanitarian?” and “How does Meghan compare to
Diana?” Invoking the name that Harry and the royals least wanted to
come out of her mouth, Samantha answered, “Diana would not isolate
family.”

Though Samantha and Tom have what one member of their family calls an
enabling and dysfunctional relationship, Tom and Thomas junior, a
choleric professional glazer, were estranged. But now Thomas junior
wanted in on the celebrity action. Arrested in 2017 for allegedly
holding a gun to his fiancée’s head before being released without
charge, he began telling increasingly bizarre stories to the tabloids
and even agreed to submit to a lie-detector test to prove the truth of a
story he told about Tom using the services of a prostitute when Thomas
was young. (Tom strongly denied these claims.) He also reportedly gave
the paparazzi Tom’s address in Rosarito Beach, a tourist town 15 miles
from Tijuana where Tom had retired a few years past. A handful of
British paps descended on Tom’s neighborhood, taking up residence in
Airbnbs along the road to his modest home and capturing him as he
visited a convenience store for cigarettes and a four-pack of Heineken.

Thomas junior’s estranged son also began speaking out, seeming like the
rational one in the bunch. Tyler Dooley, a strapping 26-year-old who
lives in Grants Pass, Oregon, said that he doesn’t even go by the name
“Markle” anymore “for obvious reasons.” His childhood in Los Angeles
“wasn’t a fantasy or fairy tale by any means,” he tells me. “Drinking
has led to so many problems in my family members’ lives.” He talks
about leaving home as a teenager, being broke, not having any water or
power in his house, and making his own way in the world. One day in the
mid-2000s, he saw a friend of his with a sports car and asked how he got
it. “Servicing federal debt” was the answer, and Tyler did that for a
couple of years, studying the teachings of Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy
to learn how to target customers’ hot points. Having a duchess in the
family had commercial virtue, and Tyler never thought that becoming
famous himself and hurting Meghan were the same thing: he hasn’t spoken
poorly about her in the media, and tells me that the truth is he has few
anecdotes to tell about her—he doesn’t remember their relationship
much, except she was very nice to him when he was younger, lost, and
ready to join the army.

In the past few years, Dooley had a marijuana business in Oregon with
his mother, Tracy. He named it Royally Grown and marketed a strain of
weed named Markle Sparkle (“sweet, silky, with a hint of blueberry”).
Tracy once told a newspaper, “We plan to build a global empire like the
Kardashians.” Today, Tyler tells me it’s important to note that he’s
moving on to CBD. The weed market is flooded, and it’s no longer a
growth crop.

Things didn’t exactly go well for the last American duchess. Wallis
Simpson, whose husband, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne when the
family shunned her, once said of her royal in-laws, “You are either
with them or dead.”

Meghan is adept at walking fine lines, but handling her biological
family and her new one—the royals—was an extraordinary balancing
job. She considered Samantha and Thomas junior part of her ancient
past—she claimed to have seen neither in years, and thought of herself
in some ways as an only child—but she does not seem to have wanted to
dis her father, whom she wrote about in loving terms on the Tig in 2014.
In a post for Father’s Day, she wrote about “our club sandwich and
fruit smoothie tradition post my tap & ballet class—classes, which by
the way, he religiously took me to on Saturday mornings after working
75+ hours a week as a lighting director.” He put “gas in my car when I
went from audition to audition trying to make it as an actress,” she
wrote, and “believed in this grand dream of mine well before I could
even see it as a possibility.” She lauded “the blood, sweat and tears
this man (who came from so little in a small town in Pennsylvania, where
Christmas stockings were filled with oranges, and dinners were potatoes
and Spam) invested in my future so that I could grow up and have so
much.” Tom would later describe her in similarly admiring terms, saying
“my daughter has been a princess since the day she was born.”

In the run-up to May’s big royal wedding, though, the relationship
hit a major snag. Knowing that a story about vulgar Americans
sells papers, the British tabloids built a case by capturing Tom’s
quotidian American-retiree life in Rosarito Beach. One day, they
photographed him buying a toilet, potatoes, and paper plates at Home
Depot and Walmart. Though Tom had been silent on the topic of his daughter for months, Samantha, perhaps feeling her oats as a media
mastermind, thought she could change her father’s profile. Working with
a paparazzo, Samantha crafted a plan for a pap to capture Tom visiting a
tailor to be fitted for a suit, and then casually relaxing reading a
book about British landmarks. “The Kardashians and Anthony Robbins do
this sort of thing—why can’t my dad?” is the way she sums up her
thinking to me. Needless to say, this harebrained scheme backfired when
the pictures appeared in The Sun and a pap working for the Daily
Mail—who was also following Tom—realized that the outings were a
setup.

Tom reportedly received a call from Meghan and Harry explaining that
they were confused as to why he had taken such bizarre action, and
asking him please not to speak to reporters or participate in any more
photographs. Of all the royals, Harry is known to absolutely revile the
press for both its role in his mother’s death and the continuing
breaches of his privacy when he traipsed the globe in his 20s drinking
much too heavily, in part to deal with his unresolved trauma. Tom claims
he offered to make an apology, but the couple said an apology would only
fuel the story, which was running on a 24/7 loop on British TV. (Sources
have raised questions about this account.) Instead, the couple,
concerned for Tom’s welfare, directed a press regulator to issue a
privacy warning to the papers to back off. Embarrassed, Tom stayed in
Mexico and pondered his mistake. Then, four days later, the
international news began broadcasting headlines that he’d had a heart
attack.

“Throughout the heart attack, I feel my dad was ignored,” says
Samantha. “Meg and Harry should have been on a plane, and been there at
the hospital, minimum. They should have taken him back on a plane to
Kensington, and had him meet Charles, and included him in the big
picture.” But that didn’t happen. “I think they might have believed it
was a fake heart attack,” says Samantha.

In England, the 92-year-old Queen, whose primary purpose in life has
been promoting the longevity of the monarchy, was watching. She had
lived through unpopularity, particularly during the saga of Princess
Diana and Charles (loneliness, bulimia, Camillagate, Squidgygate,
divorce, death by paparazzi). Much magic was lost. But in recent years,
via the classic P.R. maneuver of replacing negative stories with new
stories—the romance of William and Kate, plus Pippa’s bottom, the
addition of Prince George and two spare heirs, and now Meghan and
Harry—people fell in love again. Even in America, where today’s rich
are decidedly “out”—they reek too much of MAGA—the royals, who
embody a faraway fantasy of being rich, are hugely popular. And these
days the royal family allows their every step to be photographed and
calculated, like the world’s richest reality-show stars. The episodes
run until the end of their lives.

The Queen knew that Harry worshipped Meghan, and also that the House of
Windsor didn’t need another busted-up fairy tale. “She was very
concerned that it [the Markle situation] was spiraling out of
control, which it was,” says one observer. “Buckingham Palace wanted
to be able to do something and be proactive and make the situation go
away. It was a direction from the Queen, so her courtiers were under
strict instructions to sort it out. But Kensington Palace was not
singing from the same hymn sheet, and that was because the message was
coming from Meghan. She didn’t want to engage and thought that she could
handle it on her own.” Both palaces’ aides whispered and planned, to no
avail. “There was a lot of tension between courtiers within the two
royal households, and I think it just got to a point where it was
stalemate and, you know, neither could move.”

For years, Meghan has publicly declared that she does not read her
press, a usual tactic of Hollywood stars to seem above the messiness of
image-making. It’s a contention that sophisticated communications folks
find laughable. She may not be a press addict, as Diana was—Diana read
every page that mentioned her in the tabloids, and exulted or worried
over them—but Meghan herself was handling this fracas, or not handling
it. “This is her family, and no one at the palace would make a move
without her,” explains Patrick Jephson, Princess Diana’s former private
secretary and author of The Meghan Factor, a book weighing Meghan’s
impact on the monarchy. He pauses, then adds, “In talking about Meghan,
I wouldn’t say that her advisers are doing a good job or a bad job. It
is one of the perks of royalty never to be held responsible for their
actions.” Regardless, the observer says, “Meghan and Harry made
efforts to make sure Tom was properly kitted out for the day, so that
level of care was there, but it wasn’t enough care. He needed an equerry
to go out there and take him back to England, put him in Sandringham or
Balmoral in a small cottage where no one knew where he was, and where he
would have been very happy. That’s what should have happened.”

Meghan did what she could. By refusing to speak publicly about the fracas, or have someone speak on
her behalf, Meghan was trying to maintain her famous elegance; her
silence meant she was above the fray, plus she was more than a bit busy
planning a wedding to be watched by billions. For Harry, and Meghan, the
situation was deeply concerning as a security matter. Harry felt that
the paparazzi had placed Thomas under extraordinary pressure—and they
could destroy another parental relationship.

But at this point Tom seems to have been hurt and frustrated. His sense
of himself as a loving and generous patriarch was unpleasantly rattled.
He responded by talking to reporters at TMZ and later granting a
nine-hour interview to a British tabloid. He called the royals a
“cult,” compared them to Scientologists and the Stepford Wives family,
and added, “They’re just like a Monty Python sketch. Say a few critical
words about the royal family and they put their fingers in their ears,
cover their eyes, and pull the blinds down. They don’t want to know
about it.” He was annoyed by the way he’d been treated and said a
courtier told him to make an apology. “Suddenly I’m being told that I
needed help apologizing, as if there’s a special way to apologize to the
royal family,” he explained. “Perhaps you do it with gravy and flowers
on the side? I was taken aback to be asked if I needed help apologizing,
like I was a child.” He also swung from despair —“If Meghan never
speaks to me again,” he said, “I don’t know how I can go on without my
heart breaking”—to anger, saying, “I’ve about had it with Meghan and
the royal family.” He added, “I feel for Meghan, because she does have
a difficult family. But it’s still her family.”

This sad and embarrassing incident culminated in Tom missing his
daughter’s wedding, which he watched from an Airbnb in Rosarito Beach to
escape the paparazzi staking out his home. In his stead, Prince Charles
walked the new princess down the aisle, her silk tulle train (in a
powerful symbol, she had the official flowers of the 53 Commonwealth
nations embroidered on its edges). Doria, now a social worker, was the
only family member in attendance, and Meghan paid deep respect to her
African-American roots. Before the ceremony, according to the observer,
thinking of her father’s absence, she broke down in tears.

At the end of the Brothers Grimm’s “Cinderella,” the original
rags-to-royals story, Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters accompany her to
her wedding, but in revenge, pigeons peck out their eyes. This is not
quite what has happened to Samantha, who talked to me about wanting to
use her platform to educate people about M.S., but in the past few
months, she has disappeared into a netherworld of Twitter wars. There,
she does battle with a clan of pro-Meg forces calling themselves
Megulators (Samantha’s supporters call themselves “Megexit”). They
resent Meghan on the grounds that she “thinks that now since she has a
title and a ring on her finger, she can do whatever she wants,” which
is “nothing but an insult to all normal people,” if you can follow the
logic. After the Megulators harassed Samantha on Twitter in November,
she called the F.B.I. and asked agents to investigate death threats, but
to me she plays this off like no big deal. “It’s just a small group of
people who just want to rattle the cage,” she declares.

For a while, Tom realized that talking to the press was a losing game,
one in which he could possibly lose his daughter forever. For now, the
observer says that the two aren’t speaking, but Meghan is interested in
a probationary period during which he wouldn’t speak publicly, and then
perhaps the two would be able to mend their relationship. The real drama is this: Will Meghan insist that Tom cut ties with one daughter, Samantha—who’s been, by far, the most hostile of the Markles, to clear the way to rebuild the relationship with Meghan? Tom is caught between two daughters.

The papers in London are full of new stories about Meghan, not all of
them positive. Some are outlandish: Meghan wanted a certain emerald
tiara for her wedding and the Queen made her wear Queen Mary’s diamond
bandeau, and Meghan asked for air freshener to be sprayed in
St. George’s Chapel before her wedding because she thought it smelled
musty. Understanding what’s going on behind castle walls is always a
game of reading tea leaves, but the posh Brits I spoke with said they’d
heard that some stories were correct: Meghan’s staff is annoyed by her
waking up at a Californian five A.M. and texting about various
initiatives she wants them to pursue, and Meghan is callous toward staff
in general. One thought it was “peculiar” that her mother was the only
family member at her wedding; another even said she’d heard Meghan was
dubbed “Monster Markle” at Kensington Palace. I can’t vouch for any of
that, but when papers began reporting that Kate and Meghan had feuded
before the wedding, and then Kensington Palace issued a statement
denying a feud, I thought about Tina Brown’s comment in The Diana
Chronicles, her outstanding biography of the princess: “The palace only
bothers to deny something that’s true.”

Still, in fairy tales, magic always hovers in the distance. Far from
being snobbish about Meghan’s family and excoriating Harry about the
perils of marrying a commoner, Prince Charles, perhaps the most
important arbiter of Meghan’s stature in the royal family, is taking her
side in the scandal. Of course, Charles gains a benefit from the new
spotlight on a younger generation of royals, or the “Fab Four,” as the
British have dubbed Meghan-Harry-William-Kate. Their reflected glory
makes Charles seem like a man of substance, a patriarch, which is good,
because polls show that only a quarter of Britons want him to succeed
the Queen, who, at 92, could expire rather soon. But to the less
jaundiced observer, there’s another reason he would back Meghan, and
that’s because his own upbringing wasn’t exactly the stuff of Hallmark
Cards. When his mother, before she was crowned Queen, returned from her
own tour of the Commonwealth—similar in shape to the one taken by
Meghan and Harry—cameras captured her solemnly patting three-year-old
Charles on the shoulder. He knows from difficult families.

“Let her go conquer the world,” says Meghan’s entrepeneurial nephew,
Tyler Dooley, when we talked about his feelings toward her. “There’s
big stuff in store. I know she can make the world a better place.”
Including for Dooley. Today, in addition to getting into CBD, Dooley has
taken a role on MTV’s The Royal World, a new spin on the Real World
formula: one castle and 10 genuine royals, including a baroness, a
count, and a royal Instagram influencer nicknamed Zsa Zsa. To those who
might think he’s cashing in on his aunt’s name, he said, he sometimes
makes as much in a day as MTV paid him for the whole shebang, plus
“everybody in the house I lived in, the whole cast, is there because of
a family or a connection of some sort.” He added, “At the end of the
day, everyone dies. They might die with their titles, but they don’t
even get to keep that. You die with no money, no friends, nothing.
People are just people in the end.”

Toward the holidays, the chatter among royal correspondents was about
Meghan’s mother, Doria, who might be the first non-royal member of the
extended royal family invited to Christmas at Sandringham in the history
of the monarchy. “Kate did not go to Sandringham before she married
William in 2011, and the Middletons are still not invited,” declares
etiquette expert William Hanson. “To have a partner’s mother come is a
huge seismic shift.” During Christmas, the royals will play charades,
particularly those that involve impersonations of world leaders, but the
Queen likes to win, so everyone will need to make sure their
impersonations aren’t very good. They may play soccer against their
maids and butlers. They will eat dinner in black-tie, and they will not
go to bed before the Queen decides to go to bed. They are possibly
weighed before and after the meal, a royal tradition that was once meant
to demonstrate how well they’d been fed, though Meghan, who is fond of
light cooking and organic food and also pregnant, probably would rather
she didn’t have to do that. The rest of the Markles won’t be there,
which is sort of a shame—and makes perfect sense.